by Barry Miles
Masterson was Bill’s only contact in Chicago and it was to be near him that he came to be living in the Near North Side. Burroughs described him as “Small thin black Irish” and later told James Grauerholz that he reminded him of his London boyfriend John Brady: “The same unreliable, charming, black-Irish […] the ‘handsome face of a lousy kid.’ ” Masterson introduced him to his friends. It was a poor neighborhood and practically every kid on the block had some sort of criminal record. It was Burroughs’s first contact with small-time criminals. “They weren’t interesting at all, they were Studs Lonigan characters, lowlife, unsuccessful burglars, ward healers. They’d have crap games on Sunday and the cop would rush up. Down there, his ass sticking up in the air, grabbing all the change that was left on the concrete sidewalk. That’s a regular Sunday afternoon in Chicago.”5 Nonetheless it appealed to Bill’s nostalgie de la boue, his romantic ideal of gangsters and the Jack Black characters of his childhood reading: “There on the Near North Side at Dearborn and Halsted the feel of the Twenties will hit you.”6
The wartime labor shortage meant that anyone could get a job. Burroughs first worked as a clerk at the wartime plant of Inland Rubber, but he was fired after just a few weeks because his manager found that he had been falsifying inventory to cover up his sloppy paperwork.
Bill was taken by the idea of being a private detective and next joined the staff of Merit Protective Services Incorporated at 612 North Michigan Avenue, but the job was not as romantic as he had imagined it. They were hired by stores to check on their employees. Because it was so hard to get staff, rather than fire known thieves they preferred to scare them into honesty. Burroughs worked in a team of four with two middle-aged women and the team leader, Bob Schremser. They worked in Ohio and Iowa where they were unknown. One of the women would buy something and get her change, then the other woman would follow on close behind and give exact change. They would wait for another customer to be served, then Bill and Bob Schremser would approach the clerk and examine the till roll. If the money from the exact-change customer was missing they had their man. They would do their scare routine: “This isn’t the first time this has happened at all, is it? We’ve had you under surveillance for a long time.” They had no guns, they were not police, and they had no authority apart from being hired by the employers, but they did protect themselves in case of violence. Bob had a flagstaff and Bill had a springstaff. He never got to use it. After three months he was bored by the work and left. He had taken enough from it. Twenty years later Bob Schremser and Merit were resurrected in Nova Express:
I was travelling with Merit Inc. checking store attendants for larceny with a crew of “shoppers”—There was two middle-aged cunts one owning this Chihuahua which whimpered and yapped in a cocoon of black sweaters and Bob Schafer Crew Leader who was an American Fascist with Roosevelt jokes—7
Next came a position as an exterminator with the Nueva Fumigating Co. operating out of the branch at 2947–49 North Oakley Avenue, by the North Branch of the Chicago River. As he described in Exterminator!, “During the war I worked for A. J. Cohen Exterminators ground floor office dead-end street by the river.”8 Burroughs liked the job because he was working on his own time and he never knew what he would run into next. Qualifications for the job included having your own car; Bill had a black Ford V8. “A fat smiling Chinese rationed out the pyrethrum powder—it was hard to get during the war—and cautioned us to use fluoride whenever possible.”9 He was given a list of addresses and it was up to him to get his ten signatures a day to show work done. It usually took him about two hours, then he would have the rest of the day free until he checked out at 5:00 p.m.
I’d go to the apartment and yell, “Got any bugs, lady?” I used to bang on the door real loud, hoping to attract the neighbors so that she might lie and say she didn’t have any, and she would sign my book and I would get through my list early.
“Ssh! Ssh! Come in, come in.” The old Jewish woman would try and pull me in the door real fast, and there it would be, her bedroom with the covers all pulled back.
“Can’t spray beds, lady. Board of Health regulations.”
“Oh. You vant some more wine? It wasn’t enough before?” and she’d pour me another glass of horrible sweet wine. So I’d hold out and eventually she’d hand me a crumpled dollar bill.
Of course in the negro district it was different. I didn’t carry the Board of Health regulations there. I used to carry a gun. You never knew what might happen if one of those spade pimps woke up off the nod: “Hey, what’s this white boy doing in the apartment?”
“Shaddap, he’s the exterminator!”10
He had pyrethrum powder and sodium chloride for roaches, phosphorus paste for waterbugs, and arsenic for rats and mice that he used for warehouses. Nueva advertised “Scientific fumigation of buildings with liquid cyanide and other gases by licensed fumigators.” Whether Burroughs was licensed or not, he often worked with cyanide. Bill wore a gas mask and the room had to be carefully sealed to prevent the gas seeping into adjoining apartments, as there had been dozens of deaths caused that way. For bedbugs he used kerosene. According to a Board of Health regulation they were not to spray beds, but they lived in the ticking of the mattress. They would also get in the springs and the screw holes of a wooden bed. He would spray the bed with kerosene for a couple of dollars. Burroughs was proud of his ability to know where all the bedbugs were. “I used to have a spray gun and I could adjust it from a fine spray to a stream, and go in a room and get a bug, Phattt! From across the room, like that.” His favorite job was exterminating roaches. Bill knew just where they were. “I just go in there, to a new apartment and give them a spray with pyrethrum powder and they all rush out and die instantly on the floor. You have to get a broom to sweep them up. It’s a great sight!” He stored the information away, ready to reappear decades later in Naked Lunch:
They call me the Exterminator. At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in yellow pyrethrum powder. (“Hard to get now, lady… war on. Let you have a little… Two dollars.”) Sluiced fat bedbugs from rose wall paper in shabby theatrical hotels on North Clark and poisoned the purposeful Rat, occasional eater of human babies. Wouldn’t you?11
Bill’s landlady, Mrs. Murphy, makes a number of appearances in Burroughs’s work. She was in several cut-up texts, and was the landlady of a boardinghouse in Nome, Alaska, in 1898: “ ‘That will be two dollars extra per week,’ she said when the Frisco Kid told her I would be sharing the room.”12 Her biggest part comes when Burroughs uses her for a dialogue when he was working as an exterminator:
From a great distance I see a cool remote naborhood blue windy day in April sun cold on your exterminator there climbing the grey wooden outside stairs.
“Exterminator lady. You need the service?”
“Well come in young man and have a cup of tea. That wind has a bite to it.”
“It does that, mam, cuts me like a knife and I’m not well you know / cough/.”
“You put me in mind of my brother Michael Fenny.”
“He passed away?”
“It was a long time ago April day like this sun cold on a thin boy with freckles through that door like yourself. I made him a cup of hot tea. When I brought it to him he was gone.” She gestured to the empty blue sky “Cold tea sitting right where you are sitting now.” I decide this old witch deserves a pyrethrum job no matter what the fat Chinese allows. I lean forward discreetly.
“Is it roaches Mrs. Murphy?”
“Is it that from those Jews downstairs.”
“Or is it the hunkys next door Mrs. Murphy?”
She shrugs “Sure and an Irish cockroach is as bad as another.”13
Bill was making about fifty dollars a week: thirty dollars’ salary and twenty dollars for cheap fumigation jobs on the side and for breaking the rules. He could go out to dinner and buy decent liquor and didn’t really need his monthly allowance. He worked a
s an exterminator for about nine months, his longest-ever regular employment. He recommended the job to Ray Masterson, who was unemployed, and Masterson took a post with a rival firm. “I got him onto that job. I was the first one into this easy thing.”14
In Chicago, Burroughs appears not to have contacted Korzybski’s Institute of General Semantics again; rather, he turned his interest in language to learning Egyptian hieroglyphs, a subject he had approached earlier when he was studying Mayan hieroglyphs, and which he attributed to Colonel Sutton-Smith in The Place of Dead Roads, forty years later.15 He visited the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago to make contact with some Egyptologists. As he entered he suddenly heard a voice inside him, shrieking in his ears, “You don’t belong here! You can’t do this!” He said, “Of course, subsequently I have had many experiences of such voices, that was an early experience. Someone wanted to block me from having any contact with Egyptian hieroglyphs.”16 However, Burroughs did get assistance and was put in touch with a woman tutor. He armed himself with the two immense volumes of E. A. Wallis Budge’s An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary and would send her his hieroglyphs and she would reply with her reports.
Burroughs was nearly thirty, but after almost a year in Chicago he still harbored fantasies about the gangsters in Jack Black’s You Can’t Win, and the tommy guns and shootouts of the Chicago mobsters of the twenties. According to Lucien Carr, who was prone to exaggerate in order to tell a good story, Burroughs tried to enter the criminal underworld himself. Carr told two stories, both of which he heard from David Kammerer and were therefore likely to be exaggerated to begin with. Burroughs planned to rob a Brinks armored truck. The idea was to place a large quantity of dynamite in a manhole and blow up the truck as it passed over it. Bill and his collaborator would then rush out and grab the money. He got as far as visiting city hall to inspect the sewer maps and reconnoitering the route of the truck. He drew a map of the robbery site but it went no further than that. Carr doubted that Bill got as far as buying dynamite for the job.
Another plan was to rob Jack’s Turkish Baths at 829 North Dearborn Street, which in the late forties was the best-known gay bathhouse in Chicago.17 Burroughs was a regular at Jack’s, which was the venue for one of his more memorable homosexual encounters. He told James Grauerholz, “The redhead was in Jack’s Baths. That was a whole set that I’ve used so frequently; see, it was mirrors, red carpet, red-haired.”18 Bill snooped around and found that the safe was emptied each day at 6:00 p.m. when the maximum amount of money was on the premises. But in order to work up the courage to pull the heist, Bill spent the afternoon drinking. When he finally pulled his gun on the cashier, the man laughed and said, “Bill, you know the money leaves here at six o’clock; it’s six-fifteen.” Burroughs was able to make fun of himself later in telling the story, but he must have been humiliated at the time, and was lucky that the cashier knew him. The cashier could well have shot him or called the police. Clearly Burroughs would not have lasted long as a criminal.
Bill still didn’t feel good about himself. He knew there was something wrong, something was inhibiting him, stopping him from realizing his potential. He decided to get more psychoanalysis and his parents agreed to pay for it. Rene Spitz referred him to Kurt Eissler, a member of the Freud seminar who for many years ran the Sigmund Freud Archives in Vienna. He later emerged as an authority on juvenile delinquents—appropriate, given Burroughs’s obsession with the criminal classes. He was tall, gaunt, and unmistakably European.
Burroughs got on well with Mrs. Murphy and once helped her break down the door where a woman was trying to kill herself with gas. “Kitchen gas often causes vomiting and uncontrollable diarrhoea. […] She has shit all over herself. Ray [Masterson] took advantage of the confusion to steal her wristwatch.”19 But his good relations with Mrs. Murphy came to an end thanks to the hijinks of two of his old friends from St. Louis, David Kammerer and Lucien Carr. Carr was at the University of Chicago for two semesters in 1942, taking their famous “Great Books” course. Lucien would have stayed and completed his studies were it not for David Kammerer, who had followed him to Chicago and stalked him day and night.
David was fourteen years older than Lucien, tall, with rangy features and a big nose. He was not good-looking. He had long muscular legs and wherever he went he almost ran, rushing along with his thick, curly red hair flying, his red beard jutting forward, and his coat undone and flapping. He took stairs two at a time and arrived breathless, wringing his hands in anxiety. He had a high-pitched, fluting voice that got quieter as he spoke until he was barely audible.
Before the University of Chicago, Lucien had been sent from St. Louis to the Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, but Kammerer followed him there. The headmaster soon became aware of Lucien’s stalker and ordered Kammerer out of town. But he simply moved to the suburbs and was able to encourage Lucien to visit him and go on trips. Lucien was eventually expelled for staying out after hours with Kammerer. When Lucien was sixteen, Marion Gratz found more than fifty love letters from Kammerer in Lucien’s bedroom. Appalled, she enrolled Lucien in Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, but once again Kammerer followed. Now he had followed him to Chicago.
Lucien was in an impossible position. He couldn’t get rid of Kammerer; in fact he quite liked him and was still flattered by his attention. He had known nothing else in his adolescent life, and Kammerer ingratiated himself by writing Lucien’s term papers for him and buying alcohol. (Lucien began drinking heavily from the age of fourteen, presumably largely to assuage Kammerer’s pressure.) Lucien was still a kid and enjoyed the wrestling, the fooling around and stupid games that seventeen-year-olds enjoy and that Kammerer encouraged. It was one of these pranks that outraged Burroughs.
On one visit to Bill’s room they pissed out of his window and tore up the Gideon Bible that Mrs. Murphy thoughtfully placed in all her lodgers’ rooms. She evicted him. This was serious because in addition to full employment, there was 99.5 percent occupancy in Chicago, and rooms were extremely hard to get. Burroughs got his own back by shooting her with a poison dart in The Place of Dead Roads.20
Shortly after this, Kammerer persuaded Lucien to go on a trip with him. They drove to Princeton in Kammerer’s Model T Ford. Shortly after their return to Chicago, Lucien put his head in the gas oven and attempted suicide; a “drunken impulse,” he later called it. He was discovered when his landlady smelled gas. His mother flew in from New York, but Lucien had gone to hide out at his girlfriend’s apartment. His mother found Kammerer and gave him hell, but it still didn’t occur to her to seek legal redress to stop his stalking. Lucien was discovered when his girlfriend, who had gone to see what was happening at Lucien’s flat, ran into his mother. Lucien was tricked into visiting Cook County Hospital to make sure he was all right and only realized that he had been committed when he found there were no doorknobs on his side of the doors. He was sent to a psychiatrist and after two weeks was released into his mother’s care in New York City where she could keep watch over him. David Kammerer followed him there shortly afterward.
Burroughs was adrift. There was no direction to his life, he had no ambition, no drive. He was lonely, looking for a lover. He had an adolescent fixation on gangsters and petty criminals that had yet to play itself out. He had an inchoate interest in the language systems of Native Americans, pre-Columbian civilizations, and the Egyptians, but it would be some time before this focused in on language itself as the vehicle for received ideas and societal control. He was bored. Most of the recent excitement in his life had been caused by David Kammerer, whose ebullience and humor he enjoyed. He decided to follow him to New York.
BOOK TWO
The Beat Generation
Chapter Nine
To me the Beat Generation just means that little group at Columbia and very little else.
—LUCIEN CARR1
1. Greenwich Village 1943
Burroughs moved to Manhattan in September 1943. New York was on a war footing,
with the Brooklyn Navy Yard employing seventy thousand people, twenty-four hours a day, building and repairing warships. The docks had become high-security areas. The old forts were upgraded and the harbor defenses bolstered; an antisubmarine net and a floating boom ran from South Beach, Staten Island, to Coney Island in Brooklyn. The boom was only opened to authorized shipping and was closed at night. At Pier 88, off West 49th Street, SS Normandie, once the largest of the transatlantic liners, now lay capsized in the mud of the Hudson after an incompetent attempt to fit her as a troopship. The bars and streets of Manhattan were filled with servicemen. From April 1942, New York was partially blacked out: all the neon signs, including Times Square and the Times building’s electronic news bulletin, were doused, all windows above the fifteenth floor to be shaded, traffic lights and street lighting dimmed, car headlights hooded, because the glow from the city was silhouetting ships offshore, making them easy targets for the German submarines that patrolled off Manhattan. (On February 28, the destroyer Jacob Jones had been torpedoed off Cape May, New Jersey, with only eleven survivors of the crew of 150, so the navy was taking no further chances.) At street level, exterior lighting on the shops, restaurants, and bars was reduced, though New York was still well lit compared to the blackout of European cities.
It was during this period in New York that Burroughs met the people with whom he would always be associated and who would forever change his life: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Joan Vollmer, and Herbert Huncke; the so-called Beat Generation. Lucien Carr was the key, as they were essentially his group of young college friends. Carr had enrolled at Columbia in the summer of 1943 and was living near the college in the Union Theological Seminary on upper Broadway where his mother hoped he would be safe from the predatory attention of David Kammerer. Columbia students had been displaced from their usual halls of residence by wartime V-7 naval cadets who paraded every Saturday on South Field.
